Sonnet 135: Whoever Hath Her Wish, Thou Hast Thy Will
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Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,
And Will to boot, and Will in overplus, More than enough am I that vex thee still, To thy sweet will making addition thus. Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious, Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine, Shall will in others seem right gracious, And in my will no fair acceptance shine? The sea, all water, yet receives rain still, And in abundance addeth to his store, So thou, being rich in Will, add to thy Will One will of mine, to make thy large Will more. Let no unkind, no fair beseechers kill: Think all but one, and me in that one Will. |
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Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,
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While any other woman may have her wishes or her desire, you have your Will, meaning me, the poet, who is called Will.
William Shakespeare opens his pun-fest with a play on words as well as on proverbs, invoking, though varying, the saying "women will have their wills" and then allowing for the first of several interpretations of the word 'Will'. The primary meaning clearly is you have me, but this 'will', if considered a strong want, also contrasts with the mere wish of other women, suggesting you are more wilful than they, you will have what you want. Also imbued with a double meaning therefore is the verb 'to have', here conjugated as 'hath' and 'hast': in both instances it allows for two possible readings, either a) to have a wish/desire/will, or b) to have this wish/desire/will met, so both parts of the line can be read in several different ways: whoever has her wish, which may or may not be fulfilled, you have your will which is stronger than a mere wish, and your desire is or could be met by me, whose name is Will. The Quarto Edition capitalises and italicises 'Will' seven out of the thirteen times the word appears in this sonnet, and most editors retain the capitals, but do away with the italics, as I have done here, because the Quarto is inconsistent in its deployment of italics and it is far from certain that they are at all authorial. On the other hand, and this speaks for retaining the capitals, Shakespeare may deliberately be mixing things up to highlight the multiple meanings. Even this capitalisation though is problematic, because it suggests that where it appears the name 'Will' is always implied, which causes some interesting because conflicted meanings, as we shall see shortly... |
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And Will to boot, and Will in overplus,
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You have your Will, and on top of that or into the bargain you have even more Will, in fact you have an excess of Will.
The suggestion, especially in view of other ladies' mere 'wishes' is on the one hand that the mistress has an enormous capacity for a strong will and with it a voracious sexual desire, and, on the other hand, and by the here again capitalised and italicised 'Will' reinforced, that she has a lot of man called Will. Whether this means that she has more than one man called Will, we can't say for certain: it offers itself as a reading, and depending on how we read this, the following two lines then fall more or less easily into place. |
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More than enough am I that vex thee still,
To thy sweet will making addition thus. |
I am more than enough to stir you up, trouble, annoy, agitate, or possibly pester you, as I do, all the time, because I want to 'add myself' to 'your sweet will', meaning your vagina, in other words, I want to have sex with you.
'Vex' then as now can have quite unpleasant connotations, but they may be less earnest than we would probably read them today, and in a sexual context such as this it probably mostly just means that I am horny for you. Considering its brazen bawdiness, the line is curiously ambiguous, because read on its own and up until now, it sounds like Shakespeare is saying: I am more than enough to meet your sexual appetite. But he now adopts a different stance with an even more directly sexual meaning, and this, if just a moment ago he was implying that his mistress has at least one if not two other men called Will in her life, would rather add to the overall sauciness: |
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Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine, |
Will you, whose vagina is large and spacious, not even once grant or allow me to hide my penis in it?
Implied is not only that the mistress's vagina is physically accommodating, but also that it is generous in whom it allows to enter in. The American singer Storm Large, in a song written by her and James Beaton which contains the memorable refrain "My vagina is eight miles wide, | Absolutely everyone can come inside" makes a point of explaining: Now I am not loose and I'm not a whore This is a metaphor for My super vigantastically mystical feminine goddess core... Shakespeare four hundred years earlier similarly uses "large and spacious" as a metaphor, though as the next couple of lines make clear, he was probably thinking more in terms of his mistress's openness to other men than of her feminine divinity. PRONUNCIATION: Note that spacious here has three syllables: [spa-ci-ous]. |
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Shall will in others seem right gracious,
And in my will no fair acceptance shine? |
Should it be the case that a penis – or lust, or a penis enlarged by lust and thus erect – in other men seems to you, and is therefore treated by you as, properly gracious, as something to be wanted and appreciated, when at the same time my desire for you, and with it my penis is not graced with having the same welcome appearance to you.
Apart from bawdy, it's an oddly self-referential line, this: it makes Shakespeare's 'will' 'shine' in the mistress's eyes with 'fair acceptance', which gives it almost something of a personal glow of pride... PRONUNCIATION: Note that, similarly, gracious here too has three syllables: [gra-ci-ous]. |
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The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,
And in abundance addeth to his store, |
The sea, which is made completely of water, still readily receives the rain and so to this great abundance it has of water is happy to add yet more.
Shakespeare here again is able to draw on the proverbs with "the sea refuses no river" and "the sea is never full", making the point on the one hand of course that just because you have plenty of something does not mean you cannot allow for even more of it, but also evoking the notion of an unfathomably deep and immeasurably large entity that, perhaps not unlike Storm Large's vagina is "vigantastially mystical," although the way he ends this especially explicit quatrain suggests he may have rather more mundane meanings in mind: |
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So thou, being rich in Will, add to thy Will
One will of mine, to make thy large Will more. |
And so you, who you are rich in Will, add to this Will of yours my desire for you and more directly my penis to enrich your already great desire and your large – as in commodious and accommodating – vagina, and also possibly to make your William, me, who is 'large' as in who is well endowed, even more, as in bigger, by giving him an erection.
While the first of the two 'wills' of the second line – "One will of mine" – is a fairly straightforward pun on Shakespeare's penis, with his desire for her also obviously referenced, the two Wills in the first of these two lines are the ones that are most difficult to resolve: "being rich in Will, add to thy Will." The Quarto Edition capitalises and italicises them both, which makes them look and sound like names. It also capitalises and italicises the last 'Will' in the sentence though – "thy large Will" –which lends this instance an additional layer of complication. If Will – with a capital W and in italics – in the Quarto means a man called Will, then this line suggests that the mistress is rich not only in desire, but also in men called 'Will' and this would mean that she has a William apart from Shakespeare whom she has sex with. This could be either – as some editors suggest – her husband or – as has also been put forward – it could be another lover. Or both. It could, specifically, even be Shakespeare's young man, if he is a William: coming hard on the heels of the previous two sonnets which discuss the fact that the mistress has obviously entered a sexual relationship with the young man, this can't be ruled out, but considering how agitated Shakespeare is in these previous two sonnets it would seem somewhat strange for him to deal with this here now so humorously and generically. The capital letters and italics of the Quarto though may have been added by the typesetter or by someone editing or preparing the sonnets for publication other than Shakespeare, and in fact the line, when relieved of them, does make sense more easily, but also – alas! – more trivially: So thou, being rich in will, add to thy will One will of mine, to make thy large will more. We would then mostly read: so you, who you are rich in desire, add to this desire and to this vagina of yours my desire and my penis and in doing so enrich or enlarge both your desire and your vagina. And so here, as so very often, we may just have to accept – and we should do so gladly, really, since wordplay is so obviously the essence of this whole sonnet – that Shakespeare once again adds layer upon layer, meaning upon meaning, and leaves it to us to work it all out, more or less secure in the knowledge that we probably won't actually succeed in getting to the full complexity of it... |
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Let no unkind, no fair beseechers kill:
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Don't let any such unkindness as refusing them kill – as in disappoint, reject, kill off the desire of – your handsome suitors; in other words don't be so unkind as to say no to these attractive men who want to have sex with you.
Editors struggle with the exact sense of especially the first part of this line. The meaning overall is pretty clear and simple enough, but grammatically it is virtually impossible to determine what is what exactly here: is 'no' the word 'no' spoken or expressed by the mistress? Is 'unkind' an adjective to the mistress, or to the word 'no', or is it the mistress herself, here therefore standing as a noun, 'she, the unkind'? Should there be a comma, as there is in the Quarto, after 'unkind', or if 'unkind' is an adjective to 'no' should the comma not then be deleted and speech marks put around 'no'? That would probably make most immediate sense: Let no unkind 'no' fair beseechers kill: Don't let an unkind 'no' of yours kill these fair beseechers of yours. Weirdly though some editors punctuate: Let 'no' unkind no fair beseechers kill: Which has the same meaning but creates a poetic inversion that isn't strictly necessary nor does it add clarity. The solution though to this whole conundrum though is once again refreshingly simple: |
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Think all but one, and me in that one Will.
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Just think of all of them as one person and think of me as that one Will you then end up with.
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With Sonnet 135 William Shakespeare embarks on an exercise in making as much use of – and mischief with – his own name as poetic acrobatics will allow. He doesn't entirely avoid, one might argue, falling off the flying trapeze of rhetorical invention and into the safety net of his overall benign, endearing nature, by occasionally misjudging the fine balance there is to be kept between 'bawdy' and 'lewd', though that in itself is obviously a matter of taste.
The near compulsive punning on 'Will' with six different meanings continues into and throughout Sonnet 136 and will later be picked up again briefly, which does pose the question whether he attaches more significance to the name he shares with many men of his era than simply some self-conscious sexual innuendo...
In the rhetorical device known as antanaclasis – which we have come across before in Sonnet 128, and which describes the use of the same word with different meanings in a sentence or structure, often to comical or witty effect – 'will' here and in Sonnet 136 variously and sometimes simultaneously refers to:
1 The name William
2 'Shall', as in this or that is going to be the case
3 'Want' as a noun meaning that which someone wants to have or possess
4 'Desire', especially sexual desire, lust
5 'Penis' – this still echoes in the British English diminutive 'willy' which today has a quaint, inoffensive ring to it
6 'Vagina' – for which the term 'will' no longer finds use today
When William Shakespeare's direct contemporary Francis Meres published his commonplace book under title Palladis Tamia – Wits Treasury in 1598 and therein referred to the poet's "sugar'd sonnets" he is unlikely to have meant these two almost unsavoury though salty exponents of the form. But they are exactly the kind of poems one could imagine "circulating" among their author's "private friends," the phrase he employs to describe how it is that some of these sonnets are known by then, nearly ten years before they themselves are actually published.
As on several previous occasions, the question we are immediately confronted with is: what brings this on? What prompts our Will – the man who is to give us Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo & Juliet, and who even within these sonnets often touches upon the sublime – to indulge in a squirt of schoolboy humour and show off his verbal and conceptual dexterity around himself, his penis, the penises of others, and his mistress's vagina?
The most obvious answer may lie right there: a love of language and what you can do with it. That is simple enough and leaves us duly impressed, even if admittedly slightly bemused. And the existence of this sonnet together with its counterpart in Sonnet 136 does invite us to imagine a coterie of friends, quite possibly around the young nobleman we know as the Fair Youth, who would delight in lingual stunts of this sort: it may well be the case that Sonnets 135 and 136, although both addressed directly to the Dark Lady, are not in fact primarily intended for her eyes and ears, but for those of an audience who knows about her and doesn't mind having a bit of a laugh at her expense, such an audience at the time, one may safely imagine, consisting mostly if not exclusively, of men.
Also worth bearing in mind when reading both these poems is something we mentioned as recently as our discussion of Sonnet 133: this is not a prudish age. We, today, in many ways are far more sensitive to the subject of sex than Shakespeare and his audiences were, be they now private or public. Sex and lust, the need for the world to be peopled, as Benedick famously expresses it in Much Ado About Nothing, as well as the ever-present danger of disease through venereal infection and the unreasonable standards of moral correctitude permeate all of Shakespeare's writing, including, emphatically, the great tragedies and enduring comedies, and so we may not need to wonder quite as much as we might feel inclined to, at what to our ears and eyes can come across as a little puerile, verging on what our age is quick to call 'offensive'.
The second and therefore quite possibly more interesting and almost certainly more pertinent question then concerns itself not so much with the proliferation of 'wills' as a sexual pun, but as a first name, Will.
This is the second time, following Sonnet 134, that the suggestion has come up that there may be more than one William involved here. In Sonnet 134 though it was relatively easy to more or less dismiss the idea that that poem was making reference to another Will, not least because nothing in either the way the Quarto Edition is set or in the readings the sonnet most obviously offers supported it.
Here this is more difficult. Because not only do we have these capitalisations and italics in the Quarto, which may or may not be Shakespeare's, but we also have this insistency: the first two lines of the first quatrain almost mirror the last two lines of the last quatrain and they really push this presence of someone called Will beyond what one person can entirely reasonably bear:
[The reverse italics are here rendered as in the Quarto]
Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,
And Will to boot, and Will in overplus,
So thou, being rich in Will, add to thy Will
One will of mine, to make thy large Will more.
It still proves absolutely nothing, of course, and we are no closer to knowing who, if such an additional Will exists, that is, not least because we don't know who the Dark Lady is.
There will, of course, be an episode of Sonnetcast dedicated to precisely that latter question, but I won't spoil it for you when I tell you now that none of the generally known and discussed candidates for the Dark Lady had a husband called William. One of them, though by far not the strongest candidate, did have a scandalous and known affair with William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke who happens to be one of two major candidates for the Fair Youth, and that would bring us a bit closer once more to the possibility that there is here an overlap. It's entirely speculative though, and it is even possible, as it happens, at least in theory, that William Herbert is the other Will – if there is one – but that he still isn't the Fair Youth, although because he was only born in 1580, anything involving him in a seriously sexual capacity would push the composition of this batch of sonnets after at least 1596, more likely 1598/99, whereas current scholarly opinion dates them to the early 1590s.
A point we may be missing a bit though is this: William was an extremely popular name at the time. It still is common today: in the UK it ranks fairly consistently in the top 25 and in the US in the top 10 for boys' names, but baptismal data for England in the years covering approximately 1560 to 1610 shows William being the second favourite boys' name after John, before Thomas, Richard, Robert, and Henry. And so there may have been quite literally any number of Williams who may or may not have had a sexual relationship with Shakespeare's Dark Lady. And so rather than fixating ourselves on one particular other Will, or even on a couple of specific Williams that Shakespeare may have in mind, we may in fact consider it entirely possible that he here uses Will, with all its many and varied and obviously enjoyed over- and undertones as a generic name, the way a bit we might be talking of 'every Tom, Dick, and Harry'.
This would make perfect sense, even though it would in a way be even more insulting to or disparaging about his mistress, and it would also make the actual presence of any specific other Will doubly pointed because he would thus then be fairly roundly dismissed as one among many, indeed as is implied, too many others. Too many, at any rate, for our most specific Will to be entirely comfortable with.
And be warned: if you have had your fill of Will and think more might be overkill, our Will will next time bring you more 'will' still...
The near compulsive punning on 'Will' with six different meanings continues into and throughout Sonnet 136 and will later be picked up again briefly, which does pose the question whether he attaches more significance to the name he shares with many men of his era than simply some self-conscious sexual innuendo...
In the rhetorical device known as antanaclasis – which we have come across before in Sonnet 128, and which describes the use of the same word with different meanings in a sentence or structure, often to comical or witty effect – 'will' here and in Sonnet 136 variously and sometimes simultaneously refers to:
1 The name William
2 'Shall', as in this or that is going to be the case
3 'Want' as a noun meaning that which someone wants to have or possess
4 'Desire', especially sexual desire, lust
5 'Penis' – this still echoes in the British English diminutive 'willy' which today has a quaint, inoffensive ring to it
6 'Vagina' – for which the term 'will' no longer finds use today
When William Shakespeare's direct contemporary Francis Meres published his commonplace book under title Palladis Tamia – Wits Treasury in 1598 and therein referred to the poet's "sugar'd sonnets" he is unlikely to have meant these two almost unsavoury though salty exponents of the form. But they are exactly the kind of poems one could imagine "circulating" among their author's "private friends," the phrase he employs to describe how it is that some of these sonnets are known by then, nearly ten years before they themselves are actually published.
As on several previous occasions, the question we are immediately confronted with is: what brings this on? What prompts our Will – the man who is to give us Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo & Juliet, and who even within these sonnets often touches upon the sublime – to indulge in a squirt of schoolboy humour and show off his verbal and conceptual dexterity around himself, his penis, the penises of others, and his mistress's vagina?
The most obvious answer may lie right there: a love of language and what you can do with it. That is simple enough and leaves us duly impressed, even if admittedly slightly bemused. And the existence of this sonnet together with its counterpart in Sonnet 136 does invite us to imagine a coterie of friends, quite possibly around the young nobleman we know as the Fair Youth, who would delight in lingual stunts of this sort: it may well be the case that Sonnets 135 and 136, although both addressed directly to the Dark Lady, are not in fact primarily intended for her eyes and ears, but for those of an audience who knows about her and doesn't mind having a bit of a laugh at her expense, such an audience at the time, one may safely imagine, consisting mostly if not exclusively, of men.
Also worth bearing in mind when reading both these poems is something we mentioned as recently as our discussion of Sonnet 133: this is not a prudish age. We, today, in many ways are far more sensitive to the subject of sex than Shakespeare and his audiences were, be they now private or public. Sex and lust, the need for the world to be peopled, as Benedick famously expresses it in Much Ado About Nothing, as well as the ever-present danger of disease through venereal infection and the unreasonable standards of moral correctitude permeate all of Shakespeare's writing, including, emphatically, the great tragedies and enduring comedies, and so we may not need to wonder quite as much as we might feel inclined to, at what to our ears and eyes can come across as a little puerile, verging on what our age is quick to call 'offensive'.
The second and therefore quite possibly more interesting and almost certainly more pertinent question then concerns itself not so much with the proliferation of 'wills' as a sexual pun, but as a first name, Will.
This is the second time, following Sonnet 134, that the suggestion has come up that there may be more than one William involved here. In Sonnet 134 though it was relatively easy to more or less dismiss the idea that that poem was making reference to another Will, not least because nothing in either the way the Quarto Edition is set or in the readings the sonnet most obviously offers supported it.
Here this is more difficult. Because not only do we have these capitalisations and italics in the Quarto, which may or may not be Shakespeare's, but we also have this insistency: the first two lines of the first quatrain almost mirror the last two lines of the last quatrain and they really push this presence of someone called Will beyond what one person can entirely reasonably bear:
[The reverse italics are here rendered as in the Quarto]
Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,
And Will to boot, and Will in overplus,
So thou, being rich in Will, add to thy Will
One will of mine, to make thy large Will more.
It still proves absolutely nothing, of course, and we are no closer to knowing who, if such an additional Will exists, that is, not least because we don't know who the Dark Lady is.
There will, of course, be an episode of Sonnetcast dedicated to precisely that latter question, but I won't spoil it for you when I tell you now that none of the generally known and discussed candidates for the Dark Lady had a husband called William. One of them, though by far not the strongest candidate, did have a scandalous and known affair with William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke who happens to be one of two major candidates for the Fair Youth, and that would bring us a bit closer once more to the possibility that there is here an overlap. It's entirely speculative though, and it is even possible, as it happens, at least in theory, that William Herbert is the other Will – if there is one – but that he still isn't the Fair Youth, although because he was only born in 1580, anything involving him in a seriously sexual capacity would push the composition of this batch of sonnets after at least 1596, more likely 1598/99, whereas current scholarly opinion dates them to the early 1590s.
A point we may be missing a bit though is this: William was an extremely popular name at the time. It still is common today: in the UK it ranks fairly consistently in the top 25 and in the US in the top 10 for boys' names, but baptismal data for England in the years covering approximately 1560 to 1610 shows William being the second favourite boys' name after John, before Thomas, Richard, Robert, and Henry. And so there may have been quite literally any number of Williams who may or may not have had a sexual relationship with Shakespeare's Dark Lady. And so rather than fixating ourselves on one particular other Will, or even on a couple of specific Williams that Shakespeare may have in mind, we may in fact consider it entirely possible that he here uses Will, with all its many and varied and obviously enjoyed over- and undertones as a generic name, the way a bit we might be talking of 'every Tom, Dick, and Harry'.
This would make perfect sense, even though it would in a way be even more insulting to or disparaging about his mistress, and it would also make the actual presence of any specific other Will doubly pointed because he would thus then be fairly roundly dismissed as one among many, indeed as is implied, too many others. Too many, at any rate, for our most specific Will to be entirely comfortable with.
And be warned: if you have had your fill of Will and think more might be overkill, our Will will next time bring you more 'will' still...
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If you spot a mistake or if you have any comments or suggestions, please use the contact page to get in touch.
To be kept informed of developments, please subscribe to the email list.
If you would like to donate, you can do so here. Thank you!